Big concert tours can be looked at in a multitude of ways when it comes to enjoying the show. Do you know that you are about to drop a huge amount of coin, yes? But is it worth spending huge amounts of money on just the right seats or joining a fan club to be allowed early access to ticket purchases? This is entirely up to your budget and what you enjoy, but check out a new company that could help to turn things around by directly engaging the ticket snipers and the almighty wallet vacuum known as Ticketmaster. Whatever tool or technology that might help to level the playing field, will indeed be a great option.
Check out original post on Mashable.com
"We’ve all had the experience: You favorite musician is finally going on tour and there’s a concert in your area. You want good seats, so you queue up at your computer to be among the first to buy tickets. However, within seconds of the on-sale time, all the good seats are sold out – sometimes the entire show is sold out. You can still find those tickets, but only on the secondary market from ticket brokers who usually charge a 3X or more markup.
What the heck happened?
The practice is called ticket sniping. Think of it as ticket scalping on steroids. It’s where brokers use sophisticated software to game Ticketmaster (and other) systems so they can cut the line and buy huge blocks of high-value tickets. It’s been going on for years and while ticket brokers and others get rich, consumer frustration grows.
Counter Measures
Ticketmaster has not sat idly by. Back in 2008, it successfully sued sniping technology creator RMG Technologies. It also started using CAPTCHA technology in an effort to slow down the software and force ticket consumers to prove they are in fact real people. This year, Ticketmaster introduced online ticket reselling for Live Nation, a move that may further undercut third-party ticket brokers by providing some competition.
Upstart online event management and ticket agency Eventbrite, which allows virtually anyone to sell tickets for their events (conferences, small concerts), also sells tickets to increasingly large events, including the upcoming Governors Ball concert. [Full disclosure: Mashable uses Eventbrite for some of its own events]
Back when the company secured $50 million in funding, Founder and CEO Kevin Hartz (pictured) was hesitant to say it was ready to take on the biggest names in the business, like Ticketmaster.
"We have this worldwide market," Hartz said, "In a lot of ways it doesn't make sense to fight it out with one competitor. There's a much broader opportunity."
Now, however, Eventbrite may be thinking about taking Ticketmaster, and ticket brokers, head on.
Making It Better
Hartz maintains that the prevalence of ticket sniping and speculation (buying large blocks of tickets based on, for instance, how they think a sports team might perform in the coming season) is “a failure of innovation” in the ticketing industry.
The ticketing industry also remains something of a black box. Hartz told Mashable, “One needs to illuminate the industry to understand the dynamics of it to prevent abuse….
"Right now things are done in a back room with great obfuscation.”
Hartz is not pointing figures at any ticketing agency (a former Ticketmaster CEO is on their board), but he does see at least one possible solution.
For much of its existence, the Internet has been “extremely anonymous,” said Hartz. However, using our online identities could be the key to solving the ticket sniping problem.
The fact is, the ability to figure out and retype CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) text is no proof that you’re a human. Technology to interpret and type in CAPTCHA solutions far more quickly than humans is on the rise (to combat this, CAPTCHAs are now so complicated that many humans actually fail to decipher them). A Facebook profile, however, is harder to fake. It's "significantly more challenging for a verified "kevin hartz" to purchase hundreds of tickets versus a bot," Hartz told me in an email.
Additionally, Hartz thinks consumers will gravitate toward attaching their true identities to ticket purchases when they think they can benefit from it. One way is the native interaction that comes with social networks: ticket buying decisions could be driven by socially-generated recommendations and suggestions.
For Eventbrite, Facebook is already a huge traffic driver. Attaching identity to ticket purchases (not something Eventbrite currently does) on major venues and shows within the social media platform is the next logical step and could be the difference between you or a scalper getting those coveted front-row Katy Perry tickets.
Ticketmaster is not ignoring Facebook, far from it. It already has a Facebook app that not only offers event recommendations based on Likes, but also lets you buy tickets. Of course the app works just like the rest of Ticketmaster, and even though it knows who you are on Facebook, Ticketmaster still asks you to complete a CAPTCHA test when you want to buy a ticket. Not quite identity based, yet.
There is some good news on that front, though. Ticketmaster recently announced a plan to phase out its current CAPTCHA program in favor of a solution from partner Solve Media. Instead of hard-to-read nonsense text, ticket buyers will see "phrases, questions or ads." Ari Jacoby, CEO of Solve Media, said in a press release, that
"Consumers can solve these new CAPTCHAs in a "half the time it takes to decipher the outmoded squiggly number and letter CAPTCHAs."
Ticketmaster is also working on a mobile push notification identity proof system.
More to Do
Hartz, however, contends that traditional ticketing system’s lack of innovation extends beyond identity and anti-sniping measures. The industry is hobbled, he said by old and expensive proprietary equipment. Startups like Eventbrite can, with an iPad, its onboard camera and an iOS app, create box offices virtually on the fly.
Similarly, Eventbrite can scale up to large event management without the need for expensive hardware and software. For server power it can turn to cloud based solutions renting only the servers it needs. That agility allows Eventbrite to, Hartz maintains, expand into areas traditional competitors simply aren’t equipped to be in (international, smaller and more vertical events).
Ultimately, this is Eventbrite’s go-forward strategy, “Innovation, great technology and great service. That’s the winning combination to disrupt traditional dinosaurs in every space.”
Is it enough to truly challenge the likes of Ticketmaster? It's too early to say, though we'd probably all like to buy tickets to that fight.
Check out original post on Mashable.com
 |
| The price one dude paid for "selling" extra tickets. Image courtesy of basecrawl.wordpress.com |
What the heck happened?
The practice is called ticket sniping. Think of it as ticket scalping on steroids. It’s where brokers use sophisticated software to game Ticketmaster (and other) systems so they can cut the line and buy huge blocks of high-value tickets. It’s been going on for years and while ticket brokers and others get rich, consumer frustration grows.
Counter Measures
Ticketmaster has not sat idly by. Back in 2008, it successfully sued sniping technology creator RMG Technologies. It also started using CAPTCHA technology in an effort to slow down the software and force ticket consumers to prove they are in fact real people. This year, Ticketmaster introduced online ticket reselling for Live Nation, a move that may further undercut third-party ticket brokers by providing some competition.
Upstart online event management and ticket agency Eventbrite, which allows virtually anyone to sell tickets for their events (conferences, small concerts), also sells tickets to increasingly large events, including the upcoming Governors Ball concert. [Full disclosure: Mashable uses Eventbrite for some of its own events]
Back when the company secured $50 million in funding, Founder and CEO Kevin Hartz (pictured) was hesitant to say it was ready to take on the biggest names in the business, like Ticketmaster.
"We have this worldwide market," Hartz said, "In a lot of ways it doesn't make sense to fight it out with one competitor. There's a much broader opportunity."
Now, however, Eventbrite may be thinking about taking Ticketmaster, and ticket brokers, head on.
Making It Better
Hartz maintains that the prevalence of ticket sniping and speculation (buying large blocks of tickets based on, for instance, how they think a sports team might perform in the coming season) is “a failure of innovation” in the ticketing industry.
The ticketing industry also remains something of a black box. Hartz told Mashable, “One needs to illuminate the industry to understand the dynamics of it to prevent abuse….
"Right now things are done in a back room with great obfuscation.”
Hartz is not pointing figures at any ticketing agency (a former Ticketmaster CEO is on their board), but he does see at least one possible solution.
For much of its existence, the Internet has been “extremely anonymous,” said Hartz. However, using our online identities could be the key to solving the ticket sniping problem.
The fact is, the ability to figure out and retype CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) text is no proof that you’re a human. Technology to interpret and type in CAPTCHA solutions far more quickly than humans is on the rise (to combat this, CAPTCHAs are now so complicated that many humans actually fail to decipher them). A Facebook profile, however, is harder to fake. It's "significantly more challenging for a verified "kevin hartz" to purchase hundreds of tickets versus a bot," Hartz told me in an email.
Additionally, Hartz thinks consumers will gravitate toward attaching their true identities to ticket purchases when they think they can benefit from it. One way is the native interaction that comes with social networks: ticket buying decisions could be driven by socially-generated recommendations and suggestions.
For Eventbrite, Facebook is already a huge traffic driver. Attaching identity to ticket purchases (not something Eventbrite currently does) on major venues and shows within the social media platform is the next logical step and could be the difference between you or a scalper getting those coveted front-row Katy Perry tickets.
Ticketmaster is not ignoring Facebook, far from it. It already has a Facebook app that not only offers event recommendations based on Likes, but also lets you buy tickets. Of course the app works just like the rest of Ticketmaster, and even though it knows who you are on Facebook, Ticketmaster still asks you to complete a CAPTCHA test when you want to buy a ticket. Not quite identity based, yet.
There is some good news on that front, though. Ticketmaster recently announced a plan to phase out its current CAPTCHA program in favor of a solution from partner Solve Media. Instead of hard-to-read nonsense text, ticket buyers will see "phrases, questions or ads." Ari Jacoby, CEO of Solve Media, said in a press release, that
"Consumers can solve these new CAPTCHAs in a "half the time it takes to decipher the outmoded squiggly number and letter CAPTCHAs."
Ticketmaster is also working on a mobile push notification identity proof system.
 |
| Aldo the Apache would be a great advocate of regulating Ticketmaster, image courtesy of gavinpatricksmith.blogspot.com |
Hartz, however, contends that traditional ticketing system’s lack of innovation extends beyond identity and anti-sniping measures. The industry is hobbled, he said by old and expensive proprietary equipment. Startups like Eventbrite can, with an iPad, its onboard camera and an iOS app, create box offices virtually on the fly.
Similarly, Eventbrite can scale up to large event management without the need for expensive hardware and software. For server power it can turn to cloud based solutions renting only the servers it needs. That agility allows Eventbrite to, Hartz maintains, expand into areas traditional competitors simply aren’t equipped to be in (international, smaller and more vertical events).
Ultimately, this is Eventbrite’s go-forward strategy, “Innovation, great technology and great service. That’s the winning combination to disrupt traditional dinosaurs in every space.”
Is it enough to truly challenge the likes of Ticketmaster? It's too early to say, though we'd probably all like to buy tickets to that fight.
